Bob gives a date commonly held. However, 7Q4 from Qumran has been
identified as I Timothy 3:16-4:3. This requires the epistle to antedate
AD 68, when the settlement was destroyed. See Thiede and d'Ancona, /The
Jesus Papyrus/ (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996), pp. 125f, with
references in notes 19-21, p. 181. 7Q5 may be a fragment of Mark's
gospel.

How soon the evidence will reach the "scholars," I don't know. Petrie
found ancient Semitic inscriptions in the turquoise mines of Sinai in
1905, but a half-century later I was told by a university prof that Moses
could not have written the Pentateuch because there was no writing in the
fifteenth or thirteenth century BC. But the inscriptions were at least a
century earlier and written by slave workers.
Dave

On Mon, 5 Jan 2004 07:38:46 -0500 "Robert Schneider"
<rjschn39@bellsouth.net> writes:
Adding to Burgy's and Don's comments, I think authorship and possible
dating of these two texts is a factor to consider. While not in any way
rejecting the canonical status of these two works, and recognizing there
is not unanimous agreement, I wish to point out that the majority of NT
scholars have concluded that there is overwhelming evidence against
Pauline authorship of the letters to Timothy. They are un-Pauline in
vocabulary and style, and describe a church far more developed than that
in Paul's time. The first half of the 2nd century seems a reasonable
assumption for this pseudonymous work, according to most scholars.
Whether or not the authorship is Pauline, one would be hard put to be
certain that the phrase "all scripture" refers only to the Hebrew or
Septuagint canons (themselves still fluid), or whether the author might
have had in mind writings that never made it into the canon (e.g., I
Enoch, which the author of Jude refers to), or even some writings that
eventually made it into the NT canon, or some that did not (e.g., the
Didache). What did he mean by "all"?!
<snip>
Received on Tue Jan 6 13:47:29 2004